THE SOUND 

The music and sound effects for the piece were made by me, playing a nylon-string acoustic guitar which a  student had abandoned in a neighboring lab. I recorded the guitar in another neighboring lab's anechoic chamber using a PC and its direct-to-disk recording software. I also recorded using similar methods onto an SGI Indy. The audio files were recorded stereophonically and at a 44.1 KHz sampling rate. Used were Shure SM-58 microphones, a small mixing board and a variety of cables, adapters and microphone stands. The PC had a very loud fan, so I had to put it outside the chamber and run cables through a pipe into the chamber for the monitor, keyboard and mouse. This made for an ideal recording environment.

These are the sound files after conversion to the audio interchange file format:
 
File  Description
bach_int.aiff  introductory music, played over the titles
button.aiff  button-press sound effect
chuck.aiff  background music for the ImmersaDesk piece
sketch.aiff  while-drawing sound effect
switch.aiff  sound effect when the switch glasses message pops up
time.aiff  sound effect when the time-almost-up message pops up
arpeggio.8.aiff  background music themes for the CAVE piece
bass_theme.8.aiff   
intro.8.aiff   
intro_change.8.aiff  
main_bass.8.aiff  
main_theme.8.aiff  
theme_variation.16.aiff  
theme_variation_harmony.16.aiff  
silence.aiff  

The music was composed of several short themes, which were dynamically combined during the show to produce several distinct but interrelated background pieces. This utilized some obscure features of vss, the sound server; namely, the ability to create a sequence, and add or subtract samples from that sequence while playing it. To compose the pieces, I made a program in which I could add and subtract themes, shift timings and listen to the results. This is an example of various combinations of the above themes.
 

Artist's statement | Preplanning | Postcard | Press
Construction | Show Opening | Documentation
Photos | Refrigerator magnets